ABSTRACT
Economics has concerned itself with quantities and proportions, rather than with shapes, structures and intricate compositions of richly various pieces. Economics has adopted as its chief tools such universal mathematical notions as function and derivative, vector and matrix, where quantities, which in themselves are scalars, are associated and compared. Economic theory has elected to be general in its bearing and interests, and those concerned with human affairs at such a level of generalness are politicians and representatives of large masses of opinion, leaders of parties or trade unions. The orthodox theory of production is concerned to show by what formal tests a firm identify the most economical proportions in which to combine the agents of production to obtain a given quantity of product in each unit time-interval. Economics might almost defined as the method and exploitation of the tour de force. The means of performing it is the most central and characteristic of all economic concepts, that of market valuation.
